Mindless orange meets adjustable green things 

Finally the Pagewood Farm Chugiak Hand Dyed Sock Yarn which idled in my stash for so long is being knitted into a crescent shawl. I’m about half finished already, so expect a post with pictures for this WIP Wednesday. A lovely thing so far and again mindless TV knitting – I’m very much into it this days I have to admit. Luckily I managed to finish my Adjustable Greenie which is being test knitted at the moment.

Processing for knitting programmers 

When planning knitting patterns, I often wish for an easy way to visualize the outcome of a construction method or chart. As I’m working on a crescent shawl pattern at the moment (the Orange Thing), I really wished for a possibility to visualize the effect of different amounts of short row turning points. Why not use Processing? I’ll give it a shot this week and keep you posted here on jriede.com.

A pink feeding cup is keeping my MacBook safe 

Listening to Air’s 10.000 Hz legend I felt deeply sorry for the two MacBooks that died because of liquid damage in my household already. Realizing I often drink tea, coffee or other nasty liquids while working on my laptop I came up with a solution: children’s cups! You know, the ones that you can turn upside down and only leak little drops, not spilling all over? It works. I’m drinking red wine out of a feeding cup whenever I’m near my MacBook from now on!

Bonus: it’s pink and has little butterflies printed on it. And yes, I’m serious about it! I’ll replace this picture with a live shot later today. Promise.

While working on the LaTeX templates of my knitting pattern templates, I thought about what snippets could be automatically generated and which not. Think about size of the finished item, depending on what you are making. A rectangular stole has width and height, for a Faroese type shawl it might be more appropiate to state width as wingspan, and for a square shawl you only need one measurement at all.

So one snippet would be the size of the finished item.

Another one would be the yarn used, then gauge, needles, and notions needed. A snippet for notes about the pattern, one about the author.

And then: pattern snippets, dependent on the item you’re making. Socks usually have got toes, foot, heel, leg and cuff sections. The order depends on whether you’re working toe-up or cuff down. Sweaters might have a sleeve snippet, one for the back and one for the front, besides the generic ones – oh.

Let’s just stop here for a moment: there are generic snippets, like material, common to all knitting patterns. And then there are specific snippets as you decide on the item you are about to write a pattern for.

I see a knitting pattern generator app coming. Speaking in RoR, here are the first models: snippet, itemtype, yarn, needle, gauge, notions. Notions should get checkboxes.

Note to myself: I’ll tag this kind of technical posts from now on with the tag kpgenerator (knitting pattern generator). It’s knitting pattern generator software in the making – a WIP, so to speak.

What features would you like a knitting pattern generator to have? Just tell me, I’m listening!

The perfect combination: lace knitting & TV series 

As the yet unnamed green adjustable shawl is still on my needles, there’s time to be devoted to knitting – especially during the evenings when the kids are in bed already. Realizing I have missed that Grey’s Anatomy season 11 has already been aired I got the perfect excuse for knitting anyway: how could I dare watching TV series without being productive at the same time? You get the point.

Spring is just around the corner 

Every year I realize around the beginning of March that my closet runs short of cardigans, especially cardigans suitable for spring wearing. Living by the coast implies chill and windy weather, after all – as a quick solution I’m planning for knitting my version of Anne Elliot Spencer soon. Besides that, I’m cooking and baking: big success stories about donuts and pizza bread to be shared soon here on the blog.

Music taste never changes, does it? 

My theory about your personal preferred music is the following: the music you are coined with during your adolescence and early adulthood stays with you forever in a way. For me, this has been all about 90s punk and Indie: Fugazi, Foo Fighters, Bad Religion, Portishead, Pearl Jam and many more. Lately, I have discovered melancholia about my uprising 40th birthday next year – 90s music seems to be The Cure, I mean the cure, recently.

Photography: The Chair & Unsplash 

This chair has seen lots of the life of me, my husband and his flatmate in the 90s. It’s the type of furniture your kids have learned how to sit on, you smoked countless cigarettes on, had heated discussions over a cup of tea listening to Portishead and did unspeakable things with people on together. Recently I found out the chair is still with my husband’s flatmate in the living room of the house he now lives in.

It almost could be used as album cover artwork, especially the one above – strange facial expressions on both of us. (Yes, the girl is me – and no, this time I’m really not knitting.)

The shot has taken place in a small village near Braunschweig and has indeed been very funny. I barely could stay serious as you easily spot above.

The upper picture has been taken two weeks later, around February 15th, on a peninsula on the German North Sea coast, the place I’m currently living at. It’s been around zero degrees Celsius so yes, it was cold and yes, I’m only wearing short sleeves. Nevertheless I really enjoyed the photo shoot and just love the results.

Another lovely photography-related find last week has been Unsplash, which advertises itself as “Free high-resolution photos, 10 new photos every 10 days”. And it’s not only that, the pictures are gorgeous, too. Don’t you agree?

Creating knitting patterns is easy, creating good knitting patterns is not: there are numerous aspects of what makes a knitting pattern stand out. One of them definitely is the knitting pattern design template.

Needless to say the pattern was just cheaply made up in MS Word, had no design at all and was rather on the ugly side:

Since then, lots has happened to my knitting pattern design templates. Created in 2008, the knitting pattern template for Anton (a pattern for men’s socks) used MS Word, had my back then “logo” and my URL in the header, proper page numbering and a copyright notice in the footer. The charts were made using MS Excel with simple normal text symbols – no knitting font. The pattern featured a single column text layout set in Times New Roman, 12pt font size for the body.

An example from 2010 is the Eliane shawl pattern: same as above, the first landscape oriented charts appear.

2012 has been the year of Shawl Design in Plain English. In introduced a little more color in the pattern. The biggest change was in the charts, though: I started to use Knit Visualizer for all my charts which looked much cleaner and prettier ever since. And I got my new logo, the little yarn hugging sheep created by the very talented Adriana Hernandez.

Starting in late 2013 (but not taking effect until 014, really – I got my PhD in October 2013 which sidetracked me lots from my knitting activities) I worked on a major redesign of my knitting pattern design templates.Shown below is the pattern for Himbeeren (a hybrid female socks/stockings knitting pattern).

The new template has been designed towards improvement of clarity, readability and easy access to key information like materials needed and gauge requirements. It features all relevant information you need before casting on on the first page, two columns and separated sections for the written instructions, abbreviations and charts to make printing easier. And it (finally!) includes information about the author.

It’s been a long journey from 2008 to the knitting pattern design template above but I’m still not perfectly satified. At the moment I’m working on a major redesign using Adobe InDesign which is planned to become a set of LaTeX templates.

The main goal behind using LaTeX in the end is the option to modularize my knitting patterns to enable reusage of snippets. Why reinvent the instructions for my common 32 stitches short row heel anytime I use it in one of my patterns, for example? It only increases the chance to introduce errors. And we all like error-free patterns, don’t we?

Since spring 2012 I use Knit Visualizer for generating all charts for my knitting patterns. It’s just been today that I realized this software saves its *.kvc files as XML, actually.

eris: jule$ file chart.kvc
chart.kvc: XML document text
eris: jule$

As I’ve always been struggling with errors caused by missing chart symbols in my patterns, I can see automated chart legend on the horizon waiting to be implemented here. Definitely good for less systematical errors in patterns.

Working on automated knitting patterns anyway at them moment, it goes straight to my todo list! What knitting software are you using? Is there anything you would like to see as feature you’re missing?

Welcome to WIP Wednesday knitting! Last Christmas I received, besides other lovely gifts, two skeins of hand dyed lace weight Merino yarn. The yarn company is Ferner Wolle, based in Austria.

So far I only managed to wind the blue-green skein into a ball, the pink one is still in its original state.

This green loveliness is going to be one of the prototypes for the upcoming book Adjustable Shawls which is due by the end of the month (well, yes. Don’t take away my illusions, okay? Thank you.)

It started into life from three small stitches into a little triangle, increased up to a width of approximately six inches and is continued straight now.

Not measured yet, but I guess it’s about 25 grams into the skein which means I have to knit another 25 grams before I can mark the center and mirror the pattern towards the other end with the 50 grams left over.

The chart is easy and makes good TV knitting – I have to admit I’ve been watching airplane catastrophe B-movies all of its knitting time so far. Yes, that’s me.

What is on your needles right now? And do you think I should knit another one of these, maybe in a slightly different size, with the other skein?